Reviews
But What If We're Wrong? Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past, by Chuck Klosterman
mcreed06's review
4.0
But What If We're Wrong? by Chuck Klosterman is forever a keepsake because it is the very first book that my son Charles picked out especially for me. When presenting his gift, Charles had two requests: that I write a book report, and mention him in it.
Thrilled to oblige, I got right to reading. Alas, life with Catherine the Great is such that it took me almost two months to finish. That is in no way a reflection on Klosterman's compilation of essays on possible futuristic perceptions of our lives today. (Klosterman specifically points out that his book is not a collection of essays. However I don't know how else to describe it, so I'll use the word compilation) Though Klosterman's sometimes-contrived writing had me re-reading paragraphs here and there, But What If We're Wrong managed to keep me intrigued with unique thoughts on the present as if it were the past - the subtitle of the book. Interesting footnotes throughout But What If We're Wrong enhanced comprehension of Klosterman's writing. While reading, I often felt as if I were in a whirligig that spun me from one topic to the next; literature, music, sports, history, the cosmos, U.S. Constitution, the Great Simulator who is controlling our world, and whatnot. My mind was stretched and bent in ways that I had never experienced before.
On a road trip to West Virginia with my brother-in-law, Bill and my son, Charles, I was asked what I had been reading lately. Chuck Klosterman would be pleased to know that his book took up a good portion of the eight hours from Atlanta to Winterplace Ski Resort.
Climate Change
Coincidentally, global warming was very much on Charles' mind for his teacher had introduced the controversial topic to his class. We were not yet out of Atlanta when Charles brought up global warming, thus starting a discussion that soon created friction between Bill's acknowledgement that Earth is getting warmer, and my questioning the validity of evidence, and suspicions of political agendas.
This is one of those issues where -at least in any public forum - there are only two sides: This [Global Warming] is happening and it's going to destroy us (and isn't it crazy that some people still disagree with that), or this is not happening and there is nothing to worry about (and isn't it crazy how people will just believe whatever they're told). This is no intellectual room for the third rail, even if that rail is probably closer to what most people quietly assume: that this is happening, but we're slightly overestimating - or dramatically underestimating - the real consequence.....The third rail is the enemy of both poles. Accepting the existence of climate change while questioning its consequences is seen as both an unsophisticated denial of the scientific community and a blind acceptance of the non-scientific status quo. Nobody on either side wants to hear this, because this is something people really, really need to feel right about, often for reasons that have nothing to do with the weather.
How right is Klosterman! From the backseat, Charles listened to his mother and uncle's going back and forth, then spoke up with the need to verify evidence before reaching conclusions. Bill and I were united in lauding him with genuine praise. Our road trip was off to a good start.
Literature
Klosterman believes that the most famous writer of our era is will be someone who will remain relatively unknown in our lifetime (similar to how Herman Melville died in obscurity with no inkling that his novel Moby Dick would become renowned as a Great American Novel).
Bill nodded. Nothing to disagree with there.
Sports
Along with Chuck Klosterman, Bill and I agree that it is inevitable that a professional player will die playing an NFL football game. Considering the size of NFL players, and the brutality of mind-blowing tackles and hits, it is a miracle that it has not happened already. According to Klosterman, the aftermath of this possible tragedy may result in one of two conclusions; 1. Football will be doomed or 2. Football will survive, but not in its current form.
While I foresee major changes in the NFL's future, Bill does not believe it will be drastic. Time will tell. (Before anything happens that forever alters the future of the NFL, please, oh, please let the Atlanta Falcons win a Super Bowl).
Bill concurred when I shared Klosterman's suggestion that bowl games with low attendance but high TV viewership could be played on arenas just for TV. Could such a scenario gradually lead to the removal of the human element, and advent of robots or avatars as players? A bit far fetched, but not wholly impossible. Either way, video games, and all things electronic continue to impact every aspect of sports, including youth sports, which is on the decline. Klosterman's thoughts below:
The bottom line is that -today-if the kid doesn't like the score, he just hits restart. He starts the game over. It's wholly possible that the nature of electronic gaming has instilled an expectation of success in young people that makes physical sports less desirable. There's also the possibility that video games are more inclusive, that they give the child more control, and that they're simply easier for kids who lack natural physical gifts. All of which point to an incontestable conclusion: Compared to traditional athletics, video game culture is much closer to the (alledgedly) enlightened world we (supposedly) want to inhabit.
Should physical differences matter more than intellectual differences? Should the ability to intimidate another person be rewarded? Is it acceptable to scream at a person in order to shape his behavior? Should masculinity, in any context, be prioritized? The growing consensus of all these questions is no. Yet, these are ingrained aspects of competitive sports, all the way back to Sparta.
Maybe so, Chuck, but nothing can ever replace glorious feelings and utter heartbreaks that come with sports; the thrill of competing, watching admirable players, cheering teams to victory, exhilaration at a big play, collapsing in shock at the last second, and the inspiration to get out and play yourself. Competition is in our DNA, and man will always seek it.
History
Klosterman makes it clear that Ronald Reagan was in fact a bad President while Barack Obama was the best President of his lifetime. Mind you, not a whole lot of facts went into his declarations. Well, Chuck has his opinions, and I have mine.
Before I read But What If We're Wrong, I assumed history to be a fair judge. An objective historian in the year 2500 with no more emotional ties to this era than we have to leaders of the 1500's, will rate the Presidents of Generation X's lifetime, and decide if Barack Obama is worthy of the accolade Klosterman would have bestowed upon him. Without rose tinted glasses, this historian will have a clear view of the long lasting effects of each President's legacies, thus will be able to confirm Klosterman's opinion, or validate my personal one, that it was Ronald Reagan who brought out the best of America. I was wrong.
I should have known. History is a murky picture that we try to make sense of through a rear view mirror while speeding forward. The further we go, the more blurry things become. Klosterman points out that it has been approximately 2,200 years since Hannibal crossed the Alps with elephants to surprise Rome in the Second Punic War. While including a footnote specifying scientific evidence that a large army of mammals crossed the Alps some 2,200 years ago, Klosterman writes the following:
"What is the realistic probability that the contemporary understanding of Hannibal's 218 BC cross of the Alps on the back of war elephants is remotely accurate? The primary texts that elucidate this story were both composed decades after it happened by authors who were not there, with motives that can't be understood."
How can we achieve 100% accuracy when it is rare to get two witnesses to any event to give identical reports? Rob and I recently watched a documentary on Navy Seal Team Six, the group responsible to taking down Al Qaeda terrorist Osama Bin Laden. Not even a group as rigorously disciplined as Seal Team Six was immune to differing versions as two members went public with their accounts of that fateful evening on May 2, 2011. It is those that control the narrative that manipulate how historical figures are portrayed. Take Thomas Jefferson and John Adams; two men forever connected by their enormous contributions to the founding of United States of America. Each pulled their weight, yet only one is beautifully memorialized in Washington DC. That one is also mentioned, quoted, and portrayed more often in books, conversations, and films. Why is that? Well, the Republican Party combined with the state of Virginia has rallied around Thomas Jefferson's legacy, and carried his torch forward. Thomas Jefferson's home in Monticello was preserved, and made available for tourists, which increased his profile for future generations of Americans. John Adams, on the other hand, did not have a passionate bearer of his legacy in the state of Massachusetts or the now extinct Federalist political party. It was not until David McCullough wrote his Pulitzer Prize-winning book on John Adams, and Paul Giamatti portrayed him in the Emmy Award winning HBO miniseries when the mainstream public began to appreciate the Founding Father's significant contributions beyond what they vaguely remember from history class. David McCullough did a great service in this regard.
Bill brought up a study he read about, which further proves the unreliability of our memories. People were asked to write about a personal event, then go about their merry way until one year later when they were summoned to speak about the same event. What was said was compared with what was originally written. Significant differences abound. Klosterman put it best, "The way we think about [presidential] history is shifting sand."
When I was in college, everyone told me the worst president of all time was Ulysses S. Grant. But we now consider Grant to be merely subpar. The preferred answer to that question has become James Buchanan. On the final day of 2014, U.S. News and World Report classified Grant as only the seventh-worst president of all time, almost as good as William Henry Harrison (who was President for only thirty-one days). I have no idea how this happened. If Grant can manage to stay dead, he might become halfway decent. He could overtake Grover Cleveland!
Maybe there is hope for Donald J. Trump, who seems to be the most reviled President. Probably not in our lifetimes though. Good luck to future historians who will need to sort through contrasting versions and reports of Presidential Election 2016. Should make for some entertaining discussion, to say the least.
To demonstrate mankind's tenuous hold on history, Klosterman has a game for you.
"There's a game I like to play with people when we're at the bar, especially if they're educated and drunk. The game has no name, but the rules are simple: The player tries to answer as many of the following questions as possible, without getting one wrong, without using the same answer twice, and without looking at a phone. The first question is, 'Name any historical figure who was alive in the twenty-first century.' (No one has ever gotten this one wrong.) The second question is, 'Name any historical figure who was alive in the twentieth century.' (No one has ever gotten this one wrong, either.) The third question is, 'Name any historical figure who was alive in the nineteenth century.' The fourth question is, 'Name any historical figure who was alive in the eighteenth century.' You continue moving backward through time, in centurial increments, until the player fails. It's mildly shocking how often highly intelligent people can't get past the sixteenth century; if they make it down to the twelfth century, it usually means they either know a lot about explorers or a shitload about popes.
Charles had turned his attention to whatever video game he plays nowadays.
Bill's responses:
21st Century - Donald Trump
20th Century - Teddy Roosevelt
19th Century - Abraham Lincoln
18th Century - Thomas Jefferson
17th Century -
True to Klosterman's words, Bill, a heavy reader, and as intelligent as anyone as I know, could not go past the 18th century, He must not be well versed in "explorers or know a shitload about popes." For that matter, neither am I, and nor do I.
Of course, Bill, Charles and I can prattle endlessly about historical figures going back to mankind's BC years. On a lifelong quest to learn, we accumulate knowledge from school days, books/articles, movies/documentaries, visiting historical sites/museums, and conversations in which we have participated. Organizing it all chronologically into corresponding centuries is not a necessity, nor is it a high priority. We are mostly satisfied with the general outlines or rough frames our brains build from which we can retrieve the information acquired over the years. These outlines or frames do not seem to prioritize dates unless it is a catching one, an oft repeated one such as "In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue." Otherwise the average brain is capable of succeeding in this game in less than a snap.
The conversation ran its course before I got too far in sharing my random thoughts on how our era will be perceived by those who will inhabit Earth (or elsewhere?) in the far future.
1. Unless President Trump can miraculously unite Americans, we will see serious attempts from states to secede from the United States of America.
2. It is conceivable that football players, actors, teachers will be replaced by robots. When that happens, artificial intelligence will become a highly controversial topic.
3. A valuable skill in the future will be the ability to grow your own food.
But What If We Are Wrong filled the car up with lively conversation about everything under the sun, and those are the best kind of road trips. While 2016 was not exactly a banner year for my reading life, but it ended with one of the best gifts a reader can receive; a book. Thank you, Charles!
Thrilled to oblige, I got right to reading. Alas, life with Catherine the Great is such that it took me almost two months to finish. That is in no way a reflection on Klosterman's compilation of essays on possible futuristic perceptions of our lives today. (Klosterman specifically points out that his book is not a collection of essays. However I don't know how else to describe it, so I'll use the word compilation) Though Klosterman's sometimes-contrived writing had me re-reading paragraphs here and there, But What If We're Wrong managed to keep me intrigued with unique thoughts on the present as if it were the past - the subtitle of the book. Interesting footnotes throughout But What If We're Wrong enhanced comprehension of Klosterman's writing. While reading, I often felt as if I were in a whirligig that spun me from one topic to the next; literature, music, sports, history, the cosmos, U.S. Constitution, the Great Simulator who is controlling our world, and whatnot. My mind was stretched and bent in ways that I had never experienced before.
On a road trip to West Virginia with my brother-in-law, Bill and my son, Charles, I was asked what I had been reading lately. Chuck Klosterman would be pleased to know that his book took up a good portion of the eight hours from Atlanta to Winterplace Ski Resort.
Climate Change
Coincidentally, global warming was very much on Charles' mind for his teacher had introduced the controversial topic to his class. We were not yet out of Atlanta when Charles brought up global warming, thus starting a discussion that soon created friction between Bill's acknowledgement that Earth is getting warmer, and my questioning the validity of evidence, and suspicions of political agendas.
This is one of those issues where -at least in any public forum - there are only two sides: This [Global Warming] is happening and it's going to destroy us (and isn't it crazy that some people still disagree with that), or this is not happening and there is nothing to worry about (and isn't it crazy how people will just believe whatever they're told). This is no intellectual room for the third rail, even if that rail is probably closer to what most people quietly assume: that this is happening, but we're slightly overestimating - or dramatically underestimating - the real consequence.....The third rail is the enemy of both poles. Accepting the existence of climate change while questioning its consequences is seen as both an unsophisticated denial of the scientific community and a blind acceptance of the non-scientific status quo. Nobody on either side wants to hear this, because this is something people really, really need to feel right about, often for reasons that have nothing to do with the weather.
How right is Klosterman! From the backseat, Charles listened to his mother and uncle's going back and forth, then spoke up with the need to verify evidence before reaching conclusions. Bill and I were united in lauding him with genuine praise. Our road trip was off to a good start.
Literature
Klosterman believes that the most famous writer of our era is will be someone who will remain relatively unknown in our lifetime (similar to how Herman Melville died in obscurity with no inkling that his novel Moby Dick would become renowned as a Great American Novel).
Bill nodded. Nothing to disagree with there.
Sports
Along with Chuck Klosterman, Bill and I agree that it is inevitable that a professional player will die playing an NFL football game. Considering the size of NFL players, and the brutality of mind-blowing tackles and hits, it is a miracle that it has not happened already. According to Klosterman, the aftermath of this possible tragedy may result in one of two conclusions; 1. Football will be doomed or 2. Football will survive, but not in its current form.
While I foresee major changes in the NFL's future, Bill does not believe it will be drastic. Time will tell. (Before anything happens that forever alters the future of the NFL, please, oh, please let the Atlanta Falcons win a Super Bowl).
Bill concurred when I shared Klosterman's suggestion that bowl games with low attendance but high TV viewership could be played on arenas just for TV. Could such a scenario gradually lead to the removal of the human element, and advent of robots or avatars as players? A bit far fetched, but not wholly impossible. Either way, video games, and all things electronic continue to impact every aspect of sports, including youth sports, which is on the decline. Klosterman's thoughts below:
The bottom line is that -today-if the kid doesn't like the score, he just hits restart. He starts the game over. It's wholly possible that the nature of electronic gaming has instilled an expectation of success in young people that makes physical sports less desirable. There's also the possibility that video games are more inclusive, that they give the child more control, and that they're simply easier for kids who lack natural physical gifts. All of which point to an incontestable conclusion: Compared to traditional athletics, video game culture is much closer to the (alledgedly) enlightened world we (supposedly) want to inhabit.
Should physical differences matter more than intellectual differences? Should the ability to intimidate another person be rewarded? Is it acceptable to scream at a person in order to shape his behavior? Should masculinity, in any context, be prioritized? The growing consensus of all these questions is no. Yet, these are ingrained aspects of competitive sports, all the way back to Sparta.
Maybe so, Chuck, but nothing can ever replace glorious feelings and utter heartbreaks that come with sports; the thrill of competing, watching admirable players, cheering teams to victory, exhilaration at a big play, collapsing in shock at the last second, and the inspiration to get out and play yourself. Competition is in our DNA, and man will always seek it.
History
Klosterman makes it clear that Ronald Reagan was in fact a bad President while Barack Obama was the best President of his lifetime. Mind you, not a whole lot of facts went into his declarations. Well, Chuck has his opinions, and I have mine.
Before I read But What If We're Wrong, I assumed history to be a fair judge. An objective historian in the year 2500 with no more emotional ties to this era than we have to leaders of the 1500's, will rate the Presidents of Generation X's lifetime, and decide if Barack Obama is worthy of the accolade Klosterman would have bestowed upon him. Without rose tinted glasses, this historian will have a clear view of the long lasting effects of each President's legacies, thus will be able to confirm Klosterman's opinion, or validate my personal one, that it was Ronald Reagan who brought out the best of America. I was wrong.
I should have known. History is a murky picture that we try to make sense of through a rear view mirror while speeding forward. The further we go, the more blurry things become. Klosterman points out that it has been approximately 2,200 years since Hannibal crossed the Alps with elephants to surprise Rome in the Second Punic War. While including a footnote specifying scientific evidence that a large army of mammals crossed the Alps some 2,200 years ago, Klosterman writes the following:
"What is the realistic probability that the contemporary understanding of Hannibal's 218 BC cross of the Alps on the back of war elephants is remotely accurate? The primary texts that elucidate this story were both composed decades after it happened by authors who were not there, with motives that can't be understood."
How can we achieve 100% accuracy when it is rare to get two witnesses to any event to give identical reports? Rob and I recently watched a documentary on Navy Seal Team Six, the group responsible to taking down Al Qaeda terrorist Osama Bin Laden. Not even a group as rigorously disciplined as Seal Team Six was immune to differing versions as two members went public with their accounts of that fateful evening on May 2, 2011. It is those that control the narrative that manipulate how historical figures are portrayed. Take Thomas Jefferson and John Adams; two men forever connected by their enormous contributions to the founding of United States of America. Each pulled their weight, yet only one is beautifully memorialized in Washington DC. That one is also mentioned, quoted, and portrayed more often in books, conversations, and films. Why is that? Well, the Republican Party combined with the state of Virginia has rallied around Thomas Jefferson's legacy, and carried his torch forward. Thomas Jefferson's home in Monticello was preserved, and made available for tourists, which increased his profile for future generations of Americans. John Adams, on the other hand, did not have a passionate bearer of his legacy in the state of Massachusetts or the now extinct Federalist political party. It was not until David McCullough wrote his Pulitzer Prize-winning book on John Adams, and Paul Giamatti portrayed him in the Emmy Award winning HBO miniseries when the mainstream public began to appreciate the Founding Father's significant contributions beyond what they vaguely remember from history class. David McCullough did a great service in this regard.
Bill brought up a study he read about, which further proves the unreliability of our memories. People were asked to write about a personal event, then go about their merry way until one year later when they were summoned to speak about the same event. What was said was compared with what was originally written. Significant differences abound. Klosterman put it best, "The way we think about [presidential] history is shifting sand."
When I was in college, everyone told me the worst president of all time was Ulysses S. Grant. But we now consider Grant to be merely subpar. The preferred answer to that question has become James Buchanan. On the final day of 2014, U.S. News and World Report classified Grant as only the seventh-worst president of all time, almost as good as William Henry Harrison (who was President for only thirty-one days). I have no idea how this happened. If Grant can manage to stay dead, he might become halfway decent. He could overtake Grover Cleveland!
Maybe there is hope for Donald J. Trump, who seems to be the most reviled President. Probably not in our lifetimes though. Good luck to future historians who will need to sort through contrasting versions and reports of Presidential Election 2016. Should make for some entertaining discussion, to say the least.
To demonstrate mankind's tenuous hold on history, Klosterman has a game for you.
"There's a game I like to play with people when we're at the bar, especially if they're educated and drunk. The game has no name, but the rules are simple: The player tries to answer as many of the following questions as possible, without getting one wrong, without using the same answer twice, and without looking at a phone. The first question is, 'Name any historical figure who was alive in the twenty-first century.' (No one has ever gotten this one wrong.) The second question is, 'Name any historical figure who was alive in the twentieth century.' (No one has ever gotten this one wrong, either.) The third question is, 'Name any historical figure who was alive in the nineteenth century.' The fourth question is, 'Name any historical figure who was alive in the eighteenth century.' You continue moving backward through time, in centurial increments, until the player fails. It's mildly shocking how often highly intelligent people can't get past the sixteenth century; if they make it down to the twelfth century, it usually means they either know a lot about explorers or a shitload about popes.
Charles had turned his attention to whatever video game he plays nowadays.
Bill's responses:
21st Century - Donald Trump
20th Century - Teddy Roosevelt
19th Century - Abraham Lincoln
18th Century - Thomas Jefferson
17th Century -
True to Klosterman's words, Bill, a heavy reader, and as intelligent as anyone as I know, could not go past the 18th century, He must not be well versed in "explorers or know a shitload about popes." For that matter, neither am I, and nor do I.
Of course, Bill, Charles and I can prattle endlessly about historical figures going back to mankind's BC years. On a lifelong quest to learn, we accumulate knowledge from school days, books/articles, movies/documentaries, visiting historical sites/museums, and conversations in which we have participated. Organizing it all chronologically into corresponding centuries is not a necessity, nor is it a high priority. We are mostly satisfied with the general outlines or rough frames our brains build from which we can retrieve the information acquired over the years. These outlines or frames do not seem to prioritize dates unless it is a catching one, an oft repeated one such as "In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue." Otherwise the average brain is capable of succeeding in this game in less than a snap.
The conversation ran its course before I got too far in sharing my random thoughts on how our era will be perceived by those who will inhabit Earth (or elsewhere?) in the far future.
1. Unless President Trump can miraculously unite Americans, we will see serious attempts from states to secede from the United States of America.
2. It is conceivable that football players, actors, teachers will be replaced by robots. When that happens, artificial intelligence will become a highly controversial topic.
3. A valuable skill in the future will be the ability to grow your own food.
But What If We Are Wrong filled the car up with lively conversation about everything under the sun, and those are the best kind of road trips. While 2016 was not exactly a banner year for my reading life, but it ended with one of the best gifts a reader can receive; a book. Thank you, Charles!
schoeyfield's review
3.0
I enjoyed the premise and the style a lot. That said, I think this could have been a couple of essays and if I hadn’t succumbed to sunk cost fallacy I feel like I stopped feeling enlightened about half way through. It’s a good book. It’s a bit long for the point I feel it’s making.
jensaperstein's review
4.0
This was my first book by Chuck Klosterman, which was fun because he’s apparently a whole thing. I’m not sure what his reputation is — I need a critic that’s not Klosterman to give a Klosterman-esque take. Based solely off this book, he reminds me of a 21st century Hunter S. Thompson so long as you’re willing to substitute the drugs and guns for scientists and philosophy. Sports and politics and popular culture for both. The only other context I have for him is a meme I recently saw that said “we asked Chuck Klosterman for his thoughts on something back in 2008 and he still hasn’t stopped talking,” which felt appropriate for him and was also something I took personally. In any event, I enjoyed the book. Which is definitely something I could not say about Clarice Lispector’s [b:The Passion According to G.H.|153426|The Passion According to G.H.|Clarice Lispector|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348638958l/153426._SY75_.jpg|717921] (which I read concurrently with this book).
Bonus points because Klosterman dedicated a chapter to Isaiah Berlin’s political philosophy essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” (found in his excellent essay collection called [b:Russian Thinkers|84707|Russian Thinkers|Isaiah Berlin|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1387666438l/84707._SY75_.jpg|1184302]), which was a big inspiration for my college thesis that I did literally for fun because I liked the topic that much. I also recently found a hedgehog/fox reference in [b:On Grand Strategy|35746278|On Grand Strategy|John Lewis Gaddis|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1500913696l/35746278._SY75_.jpg|57250303] by John Lewis Gaddis (which I loved even more than I loved this book, and certainly more than [b:The Passion According to G.H.|153426|The Passion According to G.H.|Clarice Lispector|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348638958l/153426._SY75_.jpg|717921]).
Anyway, what am I missing about Klosterman? If you've heard about him, let me know in the comments. (Y)
Bonus points because Klosterman dedicated a chapter to Isaiah Berlin’s political philosophy essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” (found in his excellent essay collection called [b:Russian Thinkers|84707|Russian Thinkers|Isaiah Berlin|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1387666438l/84707._SY75_.jpg|1184302]), which was a big inspiration for my college thesis that I did literally for fun because I liked the topic that much. I also recently found a hedgehog/fox reference in [b:On Grand Strategy|35746278|On Grand Strategy|John Lewis Gaddis|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1500913696l/35746278._SY75_.jpg|57250303] by John Lewis Gaddis (which I loved even more than I loved this book, and certainly more than [b:The Passion According to G.H.|153426|The Passion According to G.H.|Clarice Lispector|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348638958l/153426._SY75_.jpg|717921]).
Anyway, what am I missing about Klosterman? If you've heard about him, let me know in the comments. (Y)
alexlea's review
5.0
I like Klosterman, so I like his work even when it's a touch dry. Fun read and was an interesting concept to bounce around in my dumbdumb brain for a couple days.
chelseamartinez's review
2.0
There was a period of time when I bought any used Chuck Klosterman book I saw and now I'm paying for it; there was that book about a freak blizzard I really liked (with a very similar cover) but this book is just architecturing about dance. By which I mean: it questions the nature of certitude, but only about astronomy and physical constants (the boringnest of scientific fields if you're looking for new shit), and football, and rock music, aka a tiny sliver of reality dominated by dude thinking.
Trump makes this book pretty obsolete while at the same time reinforcing Klosterman's point: the bad thing is not the one you expect, and it reroutes everything so that all your worrying before was totally pointless.
Trump makes this book pretty obsolete while at the same time reinforcing Klosterman's point: the bad thing is not the one you expect, and it reroutes everything so that all your worrying before was totally pointless.